Fraternity-Testvériség, 1960 (38. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1960-09-01 / 9. szám
6 FRATERNITY “All Éíirope is watching with anxiety the issues of the first of May . . . It is quite surprising that after those terrible cases of dynamiting in Paris, the day passed without any demonstration ... It seems there is no earthly good which can not by human perfidy be turned into a bad channel.” That is, man has the right to bring about a revolution, but not to engage in aimless destruction and agitation designed to promote a political belief rather than a justifiable end, such as Hungary’s independence from Austria. Sexual morality was, in Mme. Ruttkay’s mind, closely connected with the problem of women’s rights. Legal marriage was woman’s greatest safeguard, and since immorality threatened that, it threatened women’s opportunities for further advancement. The fact that illegitimate births in Hungary outnumbered legitimate births by two to one in her day was a sign both of Hungary’s subjugation and of the decadence of Europe as a whole. There were, she wrote, only three married ladies in Turin without lovers, and “alas for the unmarried ones!” In America such things did not exist, and therein lay the hope of womankind everywhere: Oh, the American women do not know in what a blessed world their lot is cast . . . But let us not omit vigilance, dear Sisters of America; let us be watchful, else thieves may break in and rob you of the blessing of your position. Whenever I see how woman is wronged in Europe, my soul turns anxiously towards Utah on the horizon of which distant clouds are gathering which, if permitted to ripen to a storm, may sweep away the exceptionally respected standing of the American woman. Polygamy has all the seeds of woman’s degradation in it, because it destroys self respect and lowers woman to a mere commodity of man. (January 24, 1881) Mme. Ruttkay’s vision of the “mormon horde” may appear ridiculous here, but it was a very real threat, in her terms, to women’s progress toward equal rights with men. Not that she was a suffragette; if she had had a “program” it would doubtless call for sweet reasonableness, respect for women and absolute morality — but not necessarily for the vote. Indeed, had she lived to see the “new woman” of the twentieth century, she would doubtless have been no less shocked than her brother would be at the situation of modern Hungary. Yet in the very fact of her intellectual independence, her liberalism (when she was 82 years old she found her political views were far to the left of most of her countrymen), and her strength of character, she must have been a strong force for female suffrage almost in spite of herself. Viewed from the twentieth century, Mme. Ruttkay, as she reveals herself in these letters, is no less a period piece than Victoria’s Crystal Palace. Called the Martha Washington of a country that still seeks its freedom, lover of literature and philosophy among the pots and pans of Kossuth’s kitchen-in-exile, and defender of the rights of women to a morality which they never desired, she nonetheless has something to tell our century about her age. Never a “spokesman,” she was rather a unique personality, made so by the coincidence of her position in relation to a really significant figure, Kossuth, her forthrightness, and her intellectual and moral independence.
